A UKCPR funded research project at the University of Michigan was published in the January 2020 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The research study, titled “Childhood Food Involvement: Protection against food insecurity in young adulthood” was supported through UKCPR’s research program aimed at exploring data in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The Michigan study looked at family behavioral factors that mitigate food insecurity in young adulthood.
The PSID began in 1968 as a survey of 4,800 American families and has followed the children and grandchildren of original sample parents as they spilt to form their own households. Now, there are more than 10,000 PSID families and 24,000 individuals. As the longest continuously running longitudinal survey --spanning topics such as work, welfare, family structure, child development, consumption, health, and wealth -- the PSID is ideally suited for the study of household behaviors over time and across generations.
The research, led by Julia Wolfson in the Department of Health Management and Policy, found that children who are involved in food preparation and those who have parents with high nutritional knowledge are less likely to experience food insecurity as young adults.
This study by Wolfson and colleagues Noura Insolera and Alicia Cohen was produced as a UKCPR discussion paper and is available at http://ukcpr.org/sites/ukcpr/files/research-pdfs/DP2019-02.pdf. Their AJPM paper is available at https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(19)30380-0/fulltext.
Funding for this work was provided by the Economic Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.